As you stand in the middle of an art gallery, you might want to slowly turn your head around the room, like a camera filming one long take. Each painting comes to you as a unified composition, a kaleidoscopic monolith, and all together they compose a necklace of rocks....

Like ethical values, beauty is nowhere to be found in the territory that can be mapped by metaphysics. There is no such thing as the property of being ‘beautiful’, that can be assigned to any object or event. Objects and events can have specific proportions and rhythms...

When I first came to London eleven years ago, everybody around me sang like a bird. My English was so poor that I could hardly understand what the locals were saying, and overhearing their conversations on a bus or in the pub resembled standing silent in a forest heari...

Imagination has a bad name. In the common use of the term, imagination is associated either with childish fancies, or with the attitude of the innovator problem-solver. It is precisely through the ritual passage between the former and the latter, that the initiation in...

I have been smoking heavily and uninterruptedly for the past 19 years. Even when both my lungs collapsed (one at a time, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to write about it!), the last thing that I did before surgery was to sneak to the hospital’s parking lot to smoke a cig...

Why look after houseplants? Aside from their obvious function as emotional filler, I mean. Aside from this aspect, what is there in looking after a plant, that is so alluring to many – and perhaps so important? The answer, as always, lies in the question itself: ‘looki...

Love is among the greatest mysteries. Its ability to hold together seemingly irreconcilable things has always inspired awe and reverence – to the point of being regarded by Empedocles as one of the founding principles of the whole cosmos. But even moving down the scale...

I spent most of my life worrying deeply about the invisible side of visibility. Recently, I’ve become more concerned with the visible side of invisibility. In less obscure terms, I have progressively moved from politics to mysticism, from history to poetry. Every day,...

The history of human thought has always been traversed by tensions between opposite conceptual poles. Among them, one particular dichotomy runs closest to the core of our understanding of the world: the tension between the perspective of the ‘discontinuous’, and that o...